from maybe to almosthttps://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com
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https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/09/23/1045/
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]]>https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/09/23/1045/feed/0rynsaywakerAn Open Letter To Your Best Intentionshttps://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/09/19/an-open-letter-to-your-best-intentions/
https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/09/19/an-open-letter-to-your-best-intentions/#respondSat, 19 Sep 2015 04:35:15 +0000http://frommaybetoalmost.com/2015/09/19/an-open-letter-to-your-best-intentions/Continue reading An Open Letter To Your Best Intentions]]>You talk about your bipolar and you tell me you understand what it’s like to live the way that I do, that there are ways to fix me. I don’t doubt that you do understand the bipolar aspects of my condition, I believe you when you say you can empathise with this small part of my disorder.

I think you do understand what it’s like to sink so deep into an indelible sadness that you can’t remember which way is up.

You understand what it’s like to be manic. To be reckless and invincible. To be high on your own chemical cocktail.

You understand what it’s like to misplace your capacity for empathy, for connection with another human soul, for guilt and morality, to become distant and cold with no provocation.

You understand what it’s like when your anxiety paralyses you and steals away your choices. When the idea of contact with another living being is too much to bear. When the world outside your walls feels too big and terrifying to face.

You understand what it’s like when basic questions (what do you want to eat, where do you want to go, how have you been, are you okay) may as well be asked in a foreign language about the principals of nuclear fusion.

And I too understand.

I understand that your ignorance is well meaning, that your desire to preach to me is a product of all your best intentions but please, for the love of God, don’t try to tell me that you know.

You don’t know what it was like the first time I watched the sky catch fire, when ash settled on my skin and in my hair and I tasted it on my tongue like toxic snowflakes.

You don’t know what it’s like to steer your grocery cart though an isle littered with corpses while generic pop music plays in the background and a mother scolds her child for sneaking candy into the cart.

You don’t know what it’s like to have to add an extra 20mins to the time it takes to do your make up in the morning for the days when your reflection won’t stop screaming long enough for you to do your lip liner.

You don’t know what it’s like to go to sleep freezing because you know that if you wake up to a heated room it will be to the smell of smoke and burnt flesh, to flames and terror so thick you can’t breathe.

You don’t know what it’s like to compulsively count your fingers and hope there’ll be more than 10 because you’re not dreaming, it’s not a dream, but you still can’t wake up.

You don’t know what it’s like to scream until your vocal chords bleed because your flailing limbs hit nothing but air but they still won’t let you go.

You don’t know what it’s like to watch your mother’s face melt away when she kisses your 8year old self goodnight. To be the monster clawing it’s way out from under the bed. To watch the clown masks on the wall laugh and laugh and laugh until you can’t remember a time when it wasn’t ringing in your ears.

You don’t know what it’s like to come to love someone who’s never existed.

You don’t know what it’s like to never escape the whispering.

You don’t know what it’s like to scream yourself awake night after night haunted by the sense memories of atrocities never committed.

You don’t know what it’s like to watch the road fall away into deep chasms of endless darkness in front of the car your loved one is driving.

You don’t know what it feels like for the grief to always be fresh because years can become hours in the space between heartbeats.

You don’t know what it’s like to lose days or weeks at a time. To misplace your memories. To not recognise your own face in mirrors and photographs.

You don’t know what it’s like to look at someone you loved the day before and see a stranger. To not know where you are in your own home. To forget your favourite colour, your favourite song.

You don’t know what it’s like to lose control of your body, to watch it move and speak and act without you.

You don’t know what it’s like to remember an emotion while completely disconnected from any capacity to actually feel it.

You don’t know what it’s like to feel the rain burn holes in your skin, to watch it sizzle and fall away in singed, bloody chunks leaving your bones brittle and bare and burning.

You don’t know what it’s like to be trapped inside your own body, incapable of speech or movement.

You don’t know what it’s like to slip into someone else with all the ease and frequency of slipping on a different dress. What it’s like to wait for the day when you slip down into the cracks between all the fractured pieces of your psyche.

You don’t know what it’s like to lose the ability to differentiate between reality and everything you can see and feel and hear and touch and taste. To not know if the horrors exist in your world as they do in the hellscape of mine.

You don’t know what it’s like to be afraid that one day everything you are will be swallowed by the nightmare you’re becoming.

You don’t know what it means to wake up afraid, each and every day of your life.

You don’t know what it means to quietly hope for the day that you don’t wake up.

Don’t tell me you understand what it means to live with my illness, all you know is what it means to live with yours.

]]>https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/09/19/an-open-letter-to-your-best-intentions/feed/0rynsaywakerA Supernova’s Discontenthttps://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/a-supernovas-disontent/
https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/09/05/a-supernovas-disontent/#respondSat, 05 Sep 2015 08:24:54 +0000http://frommaybetoalmost.com/?p=1010Continue reading A Supernova’s Discontent]]>I have never known the peace
of satisfaction,
just the endless gnawing hunger
of want.
Desperate and empty,
with all the stability
of an imploding star.
I crave the hearts of worlds
not my own,
spread thin
across the cold yearning
of my own expectation,
hollow hands with open palms
reaching ever outward.

My frame, too fragile to contain a supernova’s discontent,
vomits up my insecurities
until I am nothing but dust
to be flung to the farthest corners
of a new universe,
to drift among the debris
and taste the atoms
of creation,
to scream my fever dreams
into the void of deafening silence, desire given a voice
absent of sound.

Would it be enough?
To streak across the heavens and crash,
burning bright
with plutonic rage,
into the dark sides of undiscovered moons
consuming their mysteries in the fire of my wretched curiosity.

Would it be enough?
To send the frozen shards of my bones
into the diamond shine
of the ice giants,
to crystallise in the harsh embrace
of forgotten gods
and reverberate with the echo
of their memories.

Would it be enough?
To flood my veins
with the precious metal tang
of Mercury’s iron core
and drown my thirst
in the quicksilver rivers
of a planet’s lifeblood.

Would it be enough?
To watch the universe expand in reverse,
evolution rewind
and pull me backwards through time to take origin’s first breath,
to coat my lungs in stardust
and await
the spark of life.

Perhaps this
is the theory
of evolution,
the blinding light
of a dying sun.

Caught for an instant,
a lifetime,
an eon,
in gravity’s last stand.
Trapped on the teetering edge
of annihilation,
waiting,
breathless in the space
between heartbeats,
for the big bang.

Method

Step 1

Place a heatproof bowl over a medium saucepan that is quarter-filled with water. The bowl should fit snugly into the pan without touching the water (lift the bowl to check and remove some water if it does).

Step 2

Remove the bowl, cover the pan and bring the water to the boil over high heat. Uncover and reduce heat to very low so the water is barely simmering (there should be almost no movement at all). It is important that the water is barely simmering while making the sauce – if it is too hot, the egg yolks will cook too much and the sauce will curdle.

Step 3

Place the egg yolks and the 2 tablespoons water in the heatproof bowl and place over the pan. Use a wire balloon whisk to whisk the mixture constantly for 3 minutes or until it is thick and pale, has doubled in volume and a ribbon trail forms when the whisk is lifted.

Step 4

Add the butter a cube at a time, whisking constantly and adding another cube when the previous one is incorporated completely. (It should take about 10 minutes to add it all.) If butter is added too quickly, it won’t mix easily with the egg yolks or the sauce may lose volume. At the same time, it is important that the butter is at room temperature and added a cube at a time, so that it doesn’t take too long to be incorporated – if the sauce cooks for too long, it can curdle.

Step 5

The sauce will begin to thin when you start adding the butter. However, once the emulsion is established, it will begin to thicken again. It will continue to thicken as the remaining butter is added. If your sauce does curdle or separate it can still be rescued if it’s yet to become grainy, remove it from heat and add a dash of lemon juice before whisking furiously back into shape.

Step 6

Remove the bowl from the pan and place on a heatproof surface. The cooked sauce should have the consistency of very lightly whisked thickened cream. Whisk in the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper or a light shake of cayenne.

Enjoy immediately.

*Note: Hollandaise cannot be cooled & reheated.

]]>https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/10-min-hollandaise/feed/1HollandaiseHeaderrynsaywakerBloodsport.https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/bloodsport/
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]]>https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/bloodsport/feed/0rynsaywakerhttps://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/893/
https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/893/#commentsSun, 22 Mar 2015 09:42:20 +0000http://frommaybetoalmost.com/?p=893
]]>https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/893/feed/1rynsaywakerbebravewithyourheart“There’s No Place Like Home” – Clicked My Stilettos Against The Sidewalk.https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/no-place-like-home/
https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/no-place-like-home/#commentsSat, 21 Mar 2015 17:26:31 +0000http://frommaybetoalmost.com/?p=835Continue reading “There’s No Place Like Home” – Clicked My Stilettos Against The Sidewalk.]]>So it’s that time of year again and once again I have moved interstate (actually this was over a month ago but I’ve been shockingly busy)… Thus is the life of the perpetual nomad.

I place the blame (or perhaps the gratitude) for my gypsy soul firmly at the feet of my father, if much of ones nature is hereditary then he and I make the nature vs nurture argument utterly irrelevant. When people ask me about my childhood home my first response is “Which one?”.

I’ve never really known why it happens but 6 months into a new place I find myself feeling trapped and stagnant with itchy feet and an inexorable desire to run. After much soul searching and a bottle of champagne to lend it’s bubbly courage to my introspection I’m starting to think that it’s because I’ve always been running from a place or a person or a feeling or following someone because I didn’t know where to even start looking for somewhere I wanted to run to.

You wouldn’t think that the distinction between running from and running to would be so enormous as to have been the controlling factor in my life for nearly a decade but that one little word change may as well be the difference between true love and blanket indifference.

You’d think by now, this being my 11th move in half as many years, that I’d have it down to a fine art but for some reason with 6 days to go I was running around my apartment like a headless chicken haphazardly cramming stuff into boxes while trying to sort out connecting my utilities and internet and clean everything in reach. Needless to say I did not have this under control.

So in a state of overwhelmed defeat I did what I always do when I need basic life advice in pretty infographics or a cute and well prepared checklist and turned to Pinterest. Normally this is the fix but all I found this time was that everyone but me manages to have their shit together… And they have it together MONTHS in advance. Why is there no moving checklist for people who leave everything to the last minute? Where is this manual for competence that everyone else seems to be working from and why has no-one taken pity on me and sent it to my Kindle yet?

Still, despite my usual mad panic in the face of my own procrastination, this move was different. Due in a huge part to the spectacular amount of help I received from family and friends, something that’s never happened before, but also because beneath the stress and exhaustion was a thrumming undercurrent of excitement.

I was going somewhere I wanted to go. I’d signed the lease on a house I love, in a city I chose, to build a life with the love of mine.

For the first time in longer than I want to admit, even to myself, it felt like coming home.

]]>https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/no-place-like-home/feed/2NoPlaceLikeHomerynsaywakermovingboxes“I’ll Tell Myself That It’s Okay & This Time I’ll Believe It…” – Says The Pretender To The Mirrorhttps://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2014/11/22/says-the-pretender-to-the-mirror/
https://frommaybetoalmost.wordpress.com/2014/11/22/says-the-pretender-to-the-mirror/#commentsSat, 22 Nov 2014 09:18:30 +0000http://frommaybetoalmost.com/?p=821Continue reading “I’ll Tell Myself That It’s Okay & This Time I’ll Believe It…” – Says The Pretender To The Mirror]]>I’ve been posting pretty infrequently the last few months, to the point where I’m sure some of you wondered if this blog had been abandoned. It hasn’t, however I have found it difficult to update of late.

I always assumed that such a huge slump in my posting would be due to me reaching a point where I had nothing to say. In reality it’s quite the opposite. I’ve had a tidal wave of hellish events come crashing down and I have so much that I want to scream that it all seems to have created a choke point, a violent, tangled mess that has all of my words piling up on the back of my tongue and paralyses my fingers above my keyboard. A deafening roar of white noise drowning my focus and my creativity until I’d rather hide under my desk than sit down to write.

Actually no, that’s not strictly true, I have no problem churning out an essay or another chapter for the book I’m starting to think I might actually finish some time this decade, it’s only when it becomes personal and emotive that I find myself completely tongue tied.

This is in no way a new theme for me, I have never been entirely at ease expressing my less comfortable emotions….or any emotion for that matter. It’s just never before been an issue in my writing, it was actually sort of the whole point. I first turned to writing to counteract my inability to communicate in any kind of open and honest way and while writing open letters to strangers is perhaps not the healthiest of outlets it does in some way subvert the walls I’ve spent two decades building, even if it is the emotional equivalent of posting naked photo’s on the internet. Too intimate for public consumption but laid bare for the world to see anyway.

It’s a conversation with someone who’s opinions and judgements of me I never have to face and there is something endlessly comforting in that. A nameless, faceless companion for the times I feel adrift in a sea of supportive, caring, well meaning loved ones.

It’s not like I don’t understand that there’s something not quite right about that.

I would love nothing more than to be able to tell the love of my life how I’m feeling when she downright begs me to. I would love to confide in my best friend that I’m scared and confused and not okay when she ask’s how I’ve been. I would love to have a conversation with my mother in which I don’t make Mt. Everest into an anthill. I just don’t know how, and every time I try I find my self desperately trying to swallow my own heartbeat while listening to my voice, sounding light and carefree, saying “I’m great, how are you?”.

For the record… I am not great. I honestly can’t even remember what it feels like to be okay.

The inexorable sadists,
the indelible masochists.
We are the light at the end of the tunnel
and we are the train.

I’ve been told that writer’s are little more than professional liars, career procrastinators and champions of solitaire.

I think they were wrong,

I think to write is to fall in love, over and over and over again. With the hearts and minds and motivations of your characters, with the fictional quirks of your own creations.

I think to write is to mourn, for the unrequited love of fleeting honesty, for the death of your own orchestration.

I think to write is to find the dormant pulse of a world not yet born. To breathe your own life force across the still lips of a waking dream, already knowing that you must one day kiss those same lips goodbye.

I think to write is to shape your own insanity, to converse with apparitions and fight wars with monsters unknown. To live lifetimes in mapless worlds by the side’s of souls never born.

Or perhaps it is insanity that shaped us, shining shards of lost minds with no beacon to call us home, sinking deep into a tumoultous sea of possibility.